llular tissue. What is man but
a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop
congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing
mass of the body. Who knows what the human body would expand and flow
out to under a more genial heaven? Is not the hand a spreading palm
leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a
lichen, umbilicaria, on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop.
The lip--labium, from labor (?)--laps or lapses from the sides of the
cavernous mouth. The nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite.
The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face. The
cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed
and diffused by the cheek bones. Each rounded lobe of the vegetable
leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller; the
lobes are the fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in
so many directions it tends to flow, and more heat or other genial
influences would have caused it to flow yet farther.

Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all
the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf.
What Champollion will decipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we may
turn over a new leaf at last? This phenomenon is more exhilarating to
me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat
excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps
of liver, lights, and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side
outward; but this suggests at least that Nature has some bowels, and
there again is mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of the
ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as
mythology precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more purgative of
winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in
her swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side.
Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic.
These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace,
showing that Nature is "in full blast" within. The earth is not a mere
fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a
book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living
poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit--not a
fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life
a